


Little Boxes

by Sapphy



Series: The Eternal Batman Universe [10]
Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Fate & Destiny, Future Fic, Gen, Past Character Death, Sandman - Neil Gaimen, The Endless - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-18
Updated: 2017-05-18
Packaged: 2018-11-02 07:10:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10939524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sapphy/pseuds/Sapphy
Summary: Whatever he needs, Gotham always provides





	Little Boxes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GalaxyOHare](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GalaxyOHare/gifts).



> Giveaway prize for Galaxyofhair
> 
> This fic is a direct sequel to Marked Your Card, and won't make much sense without the rest of the series.
> 
> The song Joker's singing throughout this is Little Boxes, originally by Malvina Reynolds, but made famous by Pete Seeger. Listen to it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlSpc87Jfr0

It takes far less time to get into the city from Bristol than it once had. The Metropolis has been creeping ever closer to Wayne Manor for decades, only the white fences of suburbia keeping the skyscrapers at bay. 

Joker feels a deep revulsion for the carefully ordered streets he’s forced to walk through on his way to the city he’s been away from for far too long. The rows of identikit houses, with their tiny slivers of garden, new cars plugged into driveway charge points, conservative beige or cream curtains hanging in every window. It's not the wealth he hates - he likes Wayne Manor just fine, even now it's full of dully educational exhibits. There's no deceit there, no pretence. It's a house built for wealthy lunatics, and every brick screams it, from the neo-gothic crenulations to the secret caves. It is a place of money and madness, and he enjoys the basic honesty of it.

What he hates about suburbia is the falseness of it all, the carefully crafted normalcy. All these dull small people all thinking they’re hiding dark secrets behind their facades of ordinariness, while all the time the truth is that if you were to strip away all their masks, the true beating bloody hearts of them are just all small and dull and even more ordinary than the deformed little clone lives they live. It’s false, and stupid, and rotten to the very core, and he has no time for it.

His fingers itch for a crowbar, or gelignite, or even just some spray paint, anything he can use to ruin the polish of their horrible neighbourhood. Boxes, just hundred of carefully identical boxes…

“And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same,” he sings under his breath. He has to be quiet, even though he wants to scream, and yell, and disrupt the carefully ordered lives of the people in the boxes. He’s got work to do, and he can’t do it if people see him. Not yet.

“Do you like to sing?” a familiar voice asks, and he around in shock, to see Sopporro sitting on the hood of a beige Lexedes. So much beige, it’s starting to give him a headache.

“Sometimes, breaking into song is the only possible reaction to the world,” he says, sketching a bow. “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon, Nightmare Lady.”

She grins at him. “I snuck out,” she says in a stage whisper. “Don’t tell Auntie Scandal!”

“Cross my heart,” he replies, tracing an x over the centre of his chest. “Have you come to have a little fun?”

“I can’t stay long. I’m supposed to be being good.” She pronounces the word with all of the resigned disgust of a small child being told they have to go to bed. “But I wanted to see you again. You’re going to gives lots of people nightmares tonight, I can feel it.”

“Mostly reminding people of the old ones tonight,” he says. “But there’ll be plenty of time to get new viewers later. Act one of the drama took eighty years. We’ve got centuries until the curtain comes down.”

“Old nightmares aren’t as fun,” she says, jumping down from the car and walking up to talk his arm, “but there’s more power to them sometimes. Some of those wells are deep enough to never run dry. Can I come with you?”

“You’re the Dream Eater,” he points out. “I could hardly stop you.” He’d barely heard of her before the rescue, but a part of him has always known her, even though he’s older than her. She owns a part of whatever twisted black thing passes for his soul, and he knows her in his bones. She has power over him, and he’d object if he could, but that would be to object to his very nature, and even he’s not that contrary.

“Of course you could! You’re one of mine. If you ask me to leave I will.”

He looks down into eyes that only look blue at first glance and she blinks up at him, expression open and guileless. “Will you? Or will I just stop knowing you’re there?”

She laughs. “Does it matter?”

“Not especially. I would honoured if you would consent to walk with me, my Lady.”

“Come on then, Mr Clown, let’s go and find your destiny!”

They fall into step, Joker deliberately shortening his stride a little to account for her shorter legs, her arm linked companionably through his.

“Have I got one? A destiny I mean?”

“You’d have to ask my Uncle,” she replies. “I try and avoid all that. I just like nightmares. What do I care about all that cosmic stuff? You can’t eat any of that. You are going to meet some very important people tonight though. Important to you I mean. I can feel the shape of it, distorting the city and rippling out in all temporal directions through Her magic. You can feel it too.”

She doesn’t ask questions, he notices. She is too certain of her own power, and of him, to ever need to.

Maybe she’s right. Maybe he can feel destiny calling. Maybe that’s the song that’s been playing in his mind for the last week. “Is it the overture or the finale?”

She looks surprised. “Everything is both, surely you know that? The world doesn’t stop just because it reaches the end of a story. There will always be more stories, and more nightmares, even if they’re just giving a presentation naked again.”

He did know that, of course. Age comes with perspective, and the certainty that history stops for no man. If you want your place, you have to be prepared to blow up the tracks and derail the whole train to get it. It’s probably a good thing he stole all those explosives.

“Nearly home,” Sopporro says, staring at the lights of the city, getting closer with every step. “Such a wonderful city.”

“A smorgasbord for someone like you, I imagine.”

“People in Gotham have such inventive nightmares,” she agrees. “Especially the children.”

“The nursery rhymes probably help,” he comments. “‘They watch you when you’re sleeping, they know when you’re awake’… Are they still there, do you know? Underneath the city?”

Sopporro grins at him. “Spoilers, Mr Clown. Can’t give you any spoilers, where would be the fun in that?”

“Fair. In that case, I don’t suppose you know where I could get $2,000 worth of green fireworks, a military grade laser projector and a single red rose? I’ve got a date with destiny tonight, and I want to impress.”

She laughs softly, and it resonates somewhere deep in one of the burnt and empty parts of his memory, raising the hairs on the back of his neck, and making him need to fight back a shiver. “Oh, I’m sure you won’t have any trouble finding what you need. And you can tell me all about it some other time, because I think I can hear Auntie Scandal calling me.”

She disappears before he has a chance to say goodbye, leaving his arm feeling suddenly cold without her touch, and he shrugs his shoulders and continues on his way, singing a little louder now he can smell the river. “There’s doctors, and lawyers, and business executives, and they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.”

Ten minutes later, he crosses the river into a part of town that, a lifetime and some decidedly unconstitutional legislation ago, been Hardback's territory. In his memory the area is more poor than rundown. The sort of place where theft is a bigger problem than drugs. Where the fathers work long hours for shit wages and the mothers take in laundry and don't discuss their problems. Where the sons join boxing clubs and the daughters are pregnant by eighteen and kids who aren't either are hidden away. 

These days it’s home to the descendants of the people who survived Bloodhaven, and the people who left the Heights when the inhabitants of the Nethers began surfacing. The small brick tenements he remembers have been replaced by the kind of high-rises you only get in Gotham, where million dollar penthouses sit atop bodegas, cheap noodle joints and vehicle charging stations.

It feels like coming home, evwn with everything that's changed, and he breathes in the polluted air and laughs out loud with the exhilaration of it. To be back in his city, really back, without Batsy playing nanny, feels even better than he had expected. He's come home.

He promises himself days just wandering the streets, rebuilding his map of the city, relearning the gang territories, and finding all those sharp delineations of wealth and race that are so distinctly Gotham. Perhaps he’ll take his new Harley out with him once he’s got them, take a romantic little stroll down crime alley, do a little window shopping in Old Town.

He considers that as his feet take him where he needs to go without the need for imput from his brain. The kid had flirted, and flirting had always worked so well on the first Harley, but he doesn’t want…

“Doctor Harleen Quinzell, friend, mother, supervillain,” he recites. It’s a classy grave stone, Batsy had paid for it himself. Perhaps he’ll go visit her some time, take her some dahlias. She always loved dahlias.

So no, not romantic. Maybe a little bit of will they won’t they, just to keep the viewers entertained, but nothing… serious. He’s had altogether too much serious the last few years, surrounded by Batsy’s childhood nightmares and the screaming faces of a hundred dead civilians. It’s time for a little levity.

So friends, then. A mentor, perhaps. He purses his lips, considers his approach. The aging queer taking the recently outed youngster under his wing has a proud history, and it could work. It would give him an in.

He chuckles to himself. Too much time around Batsy is rubbing off on him. He’ll find his fireworks, and a nice gift, and he’ll play the rest by ear. And maybe the results won't be what he expected, but Gotham has never let him down yet.

His feet stop without his say so, and he finds himself looking into the dark window of a small shop with a window filled with fireworks and fancy dress costumes.

He blows the lock off the door using one of the tiny explosive charges he’d taken from the cave. The night people of the city pay as much attention as they ever have, another thing which hasn’t changed. He throws a pink cowboy hat to a working girl on her way out for the night, and she catches it out of the air and continues on her way without even looking at him, and he laughs delightedly. Gotham always did have some of the toughest, maddest hookers in the western world, and it's nice to see that that hasn't changed either.

Inside the shop he finds exactly what he’d been looking for. The fireworks are bulky, but he finds a knock-off ghostbusters costume that will pass for a uniform at a glance, and there's a sack truck in the back room. Covered with a blanket and strapped to the truck with a selection of whips taken from Catwoman costumes, the fireworks could be anything. With his suit mostly covered by the costume, he’ll pass for a delivery man at first glance, and Gotham people rarely bother with a second. They know that close scrutiny isn’t worth the trouble it causes.

He glances at the display of novelty clocks. He has an hour to get everything set up, and it’s probably going to be a lot harder to break into the GCPD building that it used to be. Setting everything off from Ace Chemicals would be fitting, and a whole lot easier, but it wouldn’t have the same power as a symbol to those who don't know his history, and for the first time in years, he’s playing to an audience of more than one.

He’d almost forgotten what it was like, planning for the reactions of the whole city, instead of only Batsy, but this is his comeback, and he needs everyone to see it.

He’s got so many ideas, all chasing one another around his head like excited hyena cubs, and he can’t make them all come true without an army. But if he plays things right tonight, an army is exactly what he’s going to get, and maybe a sidekick as well just to sweeten the deal.

Sopporro was right. Whatever he needs, Gotham always provides.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are love


End file.
